cribsheet 0.5.3

Local MCP server: markdown memory with a Chroma embedding index

cribsheet

persistent memory for your AI — plain markdown on disk, semantically indexed

Your AI assistant forgets everything between sessions. cribsheet gives it a durable, searchable memory — as plain markdown files you own, not a black box — that persists across sessions and is shared across every agent and tool you run.

It remembers two kinds of things:

• Notes — decisions, conventions, gotchas, hard-won facts. Written as markdown, found by meaning (semantic + keyword search), not just exact words.
• Code — a symbol index of your repos: every function/class/method with an LLM "what it does" description, a real call graph (who calls what), and any durable learnings you pin to a symbol. It answers the questions grep can't — find this by concept, what calls this, what does this do — across files.

Disk is the source of truth; the vector index is a derived, rebuildable cache. One warm process serves your editor (over MCP) and your terminal (crib <noun> <verb>) alike.

crib = the command. cribsheet = the project. See DESIGN.md for the full architecture.

Why

• Agents forget. Memory should be durable and shared. A decision you made last week, in another repo, in another tool's session, is one lookup away — because it's the same markdown tree behind every agent.
• grep can't answer "what does this do" or "what calls this." The code index answers by intent and traces the real call graph, so an agent (or you) finds code by concept and understands its neighbourhood in one call.
• It's plain markdown you own. No proprietary store — edit notes in your own editor, diff them in git, sync them across machines. The index rebuilds itself.
• Built to actually get used. The hard part of memory isn't storing — it's recall at the right moment. cribsheet ships the delivery layer: a one-line directive that keeps the habit in context, plugins that wire it into Claude Code, and an always-warm daemon so a lookup is never the slow path.

Quickstart

1 — Install — cribsheet is on PyPI; uv (or pipx) puts crib on your PATH with the heavy deps isolated:

uv pip install cribsheet     # or: uv tool install cribsheet  ·  pipx install cribsheet

That's the complete product — store, ONNX embedder (no torch), MCP server + warm daemon, watcher, and generation (polyllmkit, pulled from PyPI). The one genuine extra is [st], the torch embedder (host-specific wheels). No submodule dance — vendor/llmkit is only for hacking on llmkit itself.

Dev install (editable venv / uv)

python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .                        # deps (incl. polyllmkit) from PyPI

uv sync                                 # or: uv pip install -e .

# the torch embedder + llmkit's native LLM adapters (polyllmkit from PyPI):
pip install -e '.[st]' 'polyllmkit[md,bridge,anthropic,google,claude]'

# hacking on llmkit itself: overlay the submodule editable (uv sync restores git)
git submodule update --init && pip install -e ./vendor/llmkit

2 — Wire it into Claude Code. One plugin installs the MCP server, the /crib command, and the "reach for memory" directive:

claude plugin marketplace add georgeharker/cribsheet
claude plugin install cribsheet

The plugin needs nothing installed by hand. It fetches sharedserver (prebuilt — no Rust toolchain) and crib itself on first use if they aren't already present; curl and uv are the only prerequisites. sharedserver keeps one warm crib serving every session, and it's the same process the CLI attaches to.

Anything you've installed yourself wins: a crib or sharedserver already on PATH is used as-is, and $CRIB_BIN / $SHAREDSERVER_BIN are honoured without being second-guessed. /crib goes through the same resolution as the backend, so the CLI and the MCP server can never disagree about which crib they mean.

On OpenCode? The counterpart plugin lives in plugins/opencode and does the same three things (MCP server on :7732, /crib command, reach-for-crib directive). Add it to your opencode.json:

{ "plugin": ["@geohar/opencode-cribsheet@latest"] }

Full options are in the plugin's README; the MCP_COMBINER switch below applies to it too.

The plugin writes to your user-scope MCP config (claude mcp add|remove) rather than declaring a server in its manifest — that is what lets one plugin serve both deployments, and it means crib appears in claude mcp list as a user server you can inspect or remove.

Already have crib served another way? If an aggregator such as mcp-companion already proxies crib's tools, a second registration would mount every tool twice. Set the switch once, machine-wide, and the plugin registers nothing — you still get /crib and the directive:

# ~/.zshenv — must be set before Claude Code starts
export MCP_COMBINER=1                    # a combiner serves my MCPs…
export MCP_COMBINER_SERVES_CRIBSHEET=0   # …except crib — per-backend override, wins

It's a global toggle, not per-session, and it converges both ways: setting it removes crib's registration, unsetting it restores it. A change lands in the next session. Details: docs/plugin-mcp-registration.md.

Prefer to wire it by hand? Copy CLAUDE.md.example into your global $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR/CLAUDE.md — that one-line directive is what keeps the habit in context (tool descriptions alone load too late to form it).

3 — Use it. The CLI verbs mirror the MCP tools, so anything Claude does you can do too:

# notes
crib note store "Chroma is refcounted by sharedserver." -p notes  # remember a fact
crib note lookup "how is chroma managed" -p notes                 # find it by meaning
crib note apropos "how is chroma managed" -p notes                # hits as full sections

# code — onboard a repo, then ask it questions grep can't answer
cd ~/Development/myrepo
crib project setup                                # index code + docs (one call)
crib code lookup "combine ranked lists"           # find a symbol by CONCEPT
crib code dossier LexicalCache.get                # everything about one symbol
crib code graph reciprocal_rank_fusion            # walk the call graph (pstree)
crib learning add reciprocal_rank_fusion \
     "fuses by RANK, not score — robust to scale differences"   # pin a learning to it

That's the loop: store what's worth keeping, look it up by meaning, onboard a repo and explore it by concept. An agent that hits an unindexed repo self-diagnoses toward project setup, runs it, and carries on.

The surface

Every command reads as crib <noun> <verb> (and the matching MCP tool <noun>_<verb>) — four nouns for the four facets:

Every capability, its CLI form, its MCP tool, and a one-liner lives in docs/surface.md — the full reference. Grouped by task:

	notes	code
find	note lookup / note apropos (full sections)	code lookup (concept ⊕ name), code dossier, code graph/xref
write	note store, note append, note edit, note forget, note move	learning add/edit/forget
onboard	note import (files → memory), note import-memory	project setup / index / status
housekeeping	note reindex, project reconcile, note versions, note restore, memory history	learning report, learning rehome

Notes and code share one store, so lookup surfaces a repo's docs alongside your stored knowledge. A repo's .crib file ties it to a project and declares which source and docs to index (docs are indexed in-situ — the repo stays the master; crib holds only the index).

By default a verb attaches to the warm daemon (the same process the MCP server runs), so it's fast; --no-daemon runs in-process, --json gives machine output.

Going further

• Run the MCP server — the plugin (Quickstart) is the easy path: it registers crib and keeps it warm for you. To run it yourself instead: crib --mcp (stdio) or crib serve --http --port 7732, registered as a sharedserver-backed HTTP MCP so one warm crib serves every client (and the same process the CLI attaches to). Set MCP_COMBINER=1 (or MCP_COMBINER_SERVES_CRIBSHEET=1) when something else already serves crib — a combiner, or your own external process — and the plugin will stand down rather than register a second copy.
• Share across machines — the data dir is a git repo; notes sync via plain git with a frontmatter-aware merge driver so provenance never conflicts:

  crib memory sync --remote git@host:notes.git   # first machine: create + push
  crib memory setup --remote git@host:notes.git  # every other: init + merge driver + pull
  crib memory sync                               # thereafter: commit + pull + push
  

  Full walkthrough: docs/resume-on-new-machine.md.
• Mirror Claude's own memory — crib note import-memory (MCP: note_import_memory, so an agent can do it too) mirrors Claude Code's harness memory/*.md into crib (host-namespaced) and live-syncs it, so it's searchable alongside everything else.
• Configure — $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/crib/config.toml picks the embedder, retrieval mode, daemon, and backends; crib info prints the resolved paths. The defaults are sensible — a minimal override:

  [embed]
  model = "hash"          # or "fe:BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5" (fastembed), "st:<model>"
  [retrieve]
  hybrid = true           # dense ⊕ BM25, RRF-fused; rerank = true adds a cross-encoder
  [chroma]
  mode = "embedded"       # "embedded" | "shared" (sharedserver) | "json"
  [locations]
  DEV = "~/Development"   # provenance paths stored as $DEV/… so they sync clean
  

  Language-server and generation-provider examples: docs/lsp.json.example, docs/generate.toml.example.

How it works

The short version: every write funnels through one idempotent, content-hash-gated index path under a per-path lock, so races degrade to redundant work, never a wrong index. Retrieval fuses a dense vector ranking with a warm BM25 lexical ranking (RRF), with an optional cross-encoder rerank. Embedder and store are both pluggable (dependency-free defaults for dev). The code index is built live from language servers (.lsp.json specs — ty/pyright, rust-analyzer, gopls, clangd, shuck, …) for the structural facet and an LLM for the "what it does" descriptions.

The deep dives live in the docs — see Documentation below.

Documentation

Using cribsheet

• docs/guide.md — the user guide: the four facets, the noun-verb interface, and five runnable workflows. Start here.
• docs/surface.md — the complete CLI ⇄ MCP reference: every noun, every verb, one line each.
• docs/resume-on-new-machine.md — share your memory across machines over plain git.

Under the hood

• DESIGN.md — the architecture and the why, end to end (with the hybrid-retrieval pipeline diagram).
• docs/implementation.md — how it works today: a subsystem-by-subsystem map anchored to files and symbols (with the collaborator-architecture and code-index diagrams). Start here to work on the code.
• docs/code-symbol-index.md — how the code↔note index is built, and the learnings model.
• docs/retrieval-and-adoption.md — retrieval quality, and why delivery (not capability) makes a memory tool get used.
• docs/knowledge-capture.md — distill / elaborate / summarize, the generation layer over notes.

Status & tests

The store → index → lookup path, the version ring, the file watcher, git sync, the code index, and the full CLI + MCP surface all work. The dependency-free fallbacks (hash embedder, JSON store, --no-daemon) are code properties that tests and CI exercise, not install profiles.

pip install pytest && pytest -q